But the Czar, who might wish to plant a still larger army on the Indus, say thirty thousand, and would have six times our length of march, could not expect to suffer by less than three times the money, and by the total generation of camels from Mecca to "Samarcand, by Oxus--Temir's throne." Could any man rationally believe of a governor-general, left at large by his council, that, under the terrors of a phantom invasion such as this, visionary as a dream, and distant as heaven is distant, he could seriously have organized an armament which, merely by its money costs, would be likely to shake the foundations of the empire which he administered? Yet if Lord Auckland _had_ moved upon the impulse of a panic so delirious, under what colour of reason could he have been impeached by the English press, of which the prevailing section first excited, and to this day nurses intermittingly, that miserable Russian superstition?[1] The Polish craze, adopted by the press of England and France, and strengthened by the conviction that in Russia lay the great antagonist balance to the disorganizing instincts of Western Europe, had made the Czar an object of hatred to the Liberal leaders. But to improve this hatred into a _national_ sentiment in England, it was requisite to connect him by some relation with English "interests." Hence the idea of describing him as a vulture, (or as Sinbad's roc,) constantly hovering over our sheep-folds in India. Gog and Magog are not more shadowy and remote as objects for Indian armies, artillery, and rockets, than that great prince who looks out upon Europe and Asia through the loopholes of polar mists. Anti-Gog will probably synchronize with the two Gogs. And Lord Auckland would have earned the title of Anti-Gog, had he gone out to tilt on an Affghan process of the Himalaya, with--what? With a reed shaken by the wind? With a ghost, as did the grandfather of Ossian? With an _ens rationis_, or logical abstraction? Not even with objects so palpable as these, but with a Parisian lie and a London craze; with a word, with a name, nay, with a _nominis umbra_. And yet we repeat a thousand times, that, if Lord Auckland had been as mad as this earliest hypothesis of the Affghan expedition would have made him, the bulk of the English journals could have had no right to throw the first stone against a policy which, at great cost of truth and honesty, they had been promoting for years. [1] "_Miserable Russian superstition_."--This is now, we believe, decaying. But why? Not from sounder politics, but from more accurate geography. The Affghan campaigns, with the affairs of Bokhara, of Khiva, and Khoondooz, have lighted up as with torches those worlds of wilderness and obstruction; so that, in any practical sense, people are ashamed _now_ to talk of St Petersburg as threatening Delhi or Calcutta.